there are so many words to use in place of “penis” in regards to smut. there’s dick. or shaft. we got cock. member. organ. length. hell, even manhood! all are acceptable replacements.

but what do we have for the testicles? nuts? no thank you. ballsac or, lord forbid, just sac? i’d literally rather be tarred and feathered. using their government name and just calling them testicles? take me out back and gimme the ol’ yeller treatment.

how has the english language evolved so much yet we have no acceptable word for testicles in a sexy context? how can we claim we’ve advanced as a society when the best word for describing when two characters are fucking nasty and the noble and mighty testes are swaying about is balls?

BALLS

Anyone who thinks they can use AI to write a novel fails to understand what makes a story.

Steven Erikson, Gardens of the Moon

good read for teachers.

I’ve been yelling this for years

Hi yall, author of the piece here. Medium instituted a pay wall so here is a link to access it for free:

learned today (after googling it upon seeing the "Sadomasochism Brothers" post) that masochism was named by a psychiatrist who had read Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's erotic writing and was like "I feel safe in concluding that this man had Fucked-Up Freak Sex Disorder, which now until forever will bear his name", while von Sacher-Masoch was still alive. there are accounts of von Sacher-Masoch being like "bro what the fuck" about this

why write a story if no one's going to read it?

Sometimes you don't want to share a story with others. Sometimes you do want to share it, but no one clicks on the title. So why bother writing it down if the only person you can guarantee will read it is you?

worried that thing you put in your art or writing or game or music is too self-indulgent, too self-referential, too niche for anyone but yourself? fear not! you can do whatever you want forever. and you should.

Sihtric Kjartansson

The Last Kingdom / Season 5

I don't want to write fic that's "good", I want to write a fic that hits someone's id so hard it changes their brain chemistry.

To recognize TERFs, anti’s, fash, incels and other internet shitstains, one pattern you need to recognize is this:

A simple example:

Like, when you take a tiny step back, it becomes clear that the jump from ‘adults watch high school dramas’ to ‘they all want to fuck teenagers’ is absolute moon logic.

This logic only works if you assume the absolute worst possible things about the group you’re talking about. This logic works if the only lens you can see a group through is ‘predator’ and you do not acknowledge that they are completely humans who can just do non-predatory things like ‘enjoying stories’.

And assuming the absolute worst possible things about a specific group while denying their complexity and humanity… well, that is absolutely key to what TERFs, anti’s, fashos, incels, etc. do.

Someone asked me in private why I grouped ‘TERFs, anti’s, fash, incels’ together. Do I think anti’s are as bad as fash?

Short answer: no, anti’s are not as bad as fash. They’ve done some pretty despicable things. Spreading false accusations, doxxing, suicide baiting, trying to get people fired, stalking, etc. But they’re not trying to gain political power in order to commit genocide. So on the shitstain pyramid they’re a few tiers below fash.

I grouped these in a row here not because they’re all exactly the same amount of terrible, but because they’re groups to watch out for. If you’re a queer person trying to exist safely online, you do not want to interact with any of these groups. If you do not enjoy being brainwashed into a hate group, you do not want to interact with any of these groups.

It’s also notable that TERFs, incels and anti’s all have a tendency to fall down the fash radicalization pipeline because they already share some basic ways of thinking. Assuming the absolute worst possible things about a specific group while denying their complexity and humanity is an example of that shared way of thinking.

Ok, here;s my attempt: ‘Anti’ is a term that emerged in fan fiction communities to describe a group of people who felt that some forms of romantic or erotic fan fiction should be off limits to write. Stuff like:

Ignoring the fact that exploring unethical and potentially unethical situations is an essential part of what fiction is for.  Fan fiction has always been a realm through which people, especially teenagers and young adults , explore their relationship to harm, to trauma, to ethical grey areas, to taboos and to forbidden fantasies. It’s where a lot of teenagers and young adults learn that what is hot in their fantasy isn’t what they want in real life, which is an important part of sexual development.

But according to Anti’s, writing of any romantic or erotic scenario that would be unethical in real life, makes the author itself unethical. This is then used as a reason to cyberbully a person, harass, spread horrible rumors and in some cases stalk, doxx, try to get them fired, to to get them to commit suicide, etc.

Over time the term ‘Anti’ came to be used outside the fan fiction universe as people noticed that the same people doing this stuff were also campaigning against stuff like kink at Pride parades. Anti came to be defined by stuff like:

Now most Anti’s are just ‘protect the children’ pearl clutching conservatives who are very online. Most probably spend their younger years being online bullies and their later years campaigning against sex-positive sex education in schools and driving the new satanic panic or some shit like that. But a notable number of Anti’s have gone from these positions towards becoming a terf or a fascist. Turns out that people in a ‘protect the children’ panic mode who see predators everywhere are quite vulnerable to fascist ideology. No big surprise there.

I found another one! Obviously bad faith take of the day: “Ancient vampires lusting after teenagers is a trope pushed by pedophiles to normalize age differences”. Like, no. That’s more bullshit.

Fictional vampires are often interested in teenager girls because the primary readers/viewers of vampire stories are teenage girls, who like imaging themselves as the object of desire. And why do you think teenager girls like reading about magical monsters who desire them? Well, because:

These stories about monsters who desire teenage girls appear again and again because they meet the needs of teenage female readers. It’s simple as that. We do not need to invent a sinister hidden agenda to explain why these stories are popular.

And it’s fine to comment on how weird some of these fictional relationships are. I love that What We Do In The Shadows joke. But the moment we start looking for a sinister agenda behind the fact that teenage girls like reading about vampires who like teenage girls, we’re on the weird conspiracy slide. 

A friend once told me that when they are struggling with getting laundry done, she pretends it is her sworn duty to smuggle the young prince out of the castle to safety, disguised in a laundry hamper.

Now, when I am struggling with hygiene, I pretend I am part of a village with an annual festival, and I get one day a year to spend luxuriously at a bathhouse in preparation.

What my friend imparted on me was the skill of turning mundane tasks into fantastical adventures to make them more compelling and bearable.

So next time you need to go on a mental health walk, maybe consider doing reconnaissance for a secret underground organisation.

Next time cooking is too much of a chore, consider you ability to turn space station rations into a feast to the delight of your crewmates.

being cosmically "insignificant" doesnt even matter like its not important......... like literally lets enjoy a strawberry

as a physicists the whole 'cosmically significant' is so funny. nothing is cosmically significant. the sun is small and tiny compared to, most starts and even stars are small next to the gravitational pull of supermassive black holes and even then is doesn't matter bc, the universe is both infinite and in vast expanse so why would one black whole matter?, which means at the end everything matters bc the universe is a sum of its parts all parts are so stupid small to the universe they all, matter and we are here enjoying a strawberry, isnt it nice?, (via las-lus)

and is your shame helpful? is it inspiring goodness and change? or is it keeping you frozen in time unable to move on and be everything you have expanded to be?

Speaking of therapy, I say, as though we're old friends, and you're not a stranger trapped in this metaphorical elevator with me and you can hear the suspension wires starting to fray.

I've been doing a lot of work recently that's focused on imposter syndrome and the feeling that no matter how well or how much I do, I'm not good enough. That I'm somehow tricking everyone into thinking my work is actually good.

Some days it's a minor niggle in my head that I can gentle and soothe with logic and affirmations. Or smother, depending on the mood. Other times it's loud and all-consuming and the mental anguish it causes me is so real I can feel it twitching in my muscles. This desperate fight-or-flight instinct with nowhere to go and nothing to fight but myself.

Anyway, because I'm several types of Mentally Unwell™, I was switching between workshop sheets ahead of next week. Filling in different forms. (Trying to get a good grade in therapy) And I got my "recognize your harmful ADHD coping mechanisms" worksheet mixed in with the "you're not actually lying to people, you just feel like you are because your brain is full of weasels" worksheet, and seeing them side by side made something go topsy turvy in my head, and I just had to sit and breathe for a couple of minutes until the urge to scream passed. Because it clicked, it all suddenly clicked.

The reason the imposter syndrome workshops and therapy sessions aren't sticking was because I do routinely trick people into thinking I'm someone I'm not.

Because I'm masking my ADHD for their convenience.

I've always known there was something wrong with me. My neurotypical peers made it abundantly clear I didn't fit in or was failing in some way I couldn't see nor remedy, no matter how hard I tried.

So I compressed myself into a workaholic box of hyper-competence in the hopes they'd stop noticing the flaws and exploit like me instead. And then subsequently lived with the daily fear that if they looked too close, they'd realize I'm a monumental fuck up with enough personal baggage to block the Suez Canal.

If you ever need someone to burn themselves to ashes for your comfort and convenience, I'm your gal.

Or I used to. Until I had a bit of a breakdown, and the rubber band holding my brain together snapped and pinged off into the stratosphere, never to be seen again.

Unfortunately, the trauma of living like that didn't also fuck off and instead left a gaping maw where my personality ought to be, so now I get to deal with that aftermath.

And it's that aftermath that's affecting the imposter syndrome shit. Because yes, I am hyper-competent and good at what I do-- but it doesn't feel real because that is how I mask.

And the truly frustrating thing is I am good at what I do. I am not pretending. I worked hard to be good at this. It just feels like I'm dicking around because 90% of my personality turns out to be trauma masquerading as humor in a trenchcoat, and having people genuinely like something weird I'm doing is so foreign my brain has decided it's just another form of masking.

I'm pretending to be a good author so people will think I'm a good author, and my brain thinks we are in Danger of being found out. We are in Danger, and writing is Dangerous because then people will know I'm Weird and not whatever palatable version I've presented myself as for their NT sensibilities.

Like the neurotic vampire with a raging praise kink wasn't an obvious giveaway.

Anyway. I got nothing else. Thanks for listening.

I'm going to go be very normal in another room and not stare into the abyss of my own soul for a bit.

I brought this post up with my ADHD therapist today (who also has ADHD), and she got so still that I thought our Zoom call had frozen.

Turns out she just needed to stare into her soul for a bit and it looked like this:

Every so often, I see notes from this post go past in my activity feed, and the tags really do look like a mass of people screaming as the suspension wires holding up the metaphorical elevator snap and we all plunge into the abyss.

Sorry/happy to have helped rip the bandaid off that coping mechanism for you. Hope it wasn't too load-bearing...

Anyway. I'm starting EMDR trauma therapy for this soon because I haven't been able to gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss DBT my way out of this one, so, y'know, really puts the trauma of masking in perspective when you have to resort to the same desensitization and reprocessing therapy you use to cope with the cPTSD from literally almost dying.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Unrelated but ADHD flavored note, where the hell did you get such a crystal clear image of Lisa staring at the table??? I can only find versions that look like they got converted to pdf or some shit

r/memeresotration.

The image looks grainy on the google search but when you click on it, it clarifies.

bitches will hear a song and be like 'this makes me feel like i have a gaping hole in my chest' and then they put it on repeat. its me im bitches